Celebrate seven strange years of Cult of Weird with a special birthday Box of Weird giveaway featuring weird novelties and oddities.

Cult of Weird manifested in our reality from the slimy ethereal sphincter of the cosmic nether seven years ago, on June 23, 2010. It began as my own personal excuse to research historical mysteries, keep tabs on the latest weird news headlines, and collect strange things like freeze-dried piranhas and antique coffin hardware.

The Cult has since grown into a beast I can barely keep up with, serving up a daily dose of deranged to over a million insatiably curious minds every year.

As a thank you to all of you who read my ramblings, share on social media, post funny, insightful or intellectual comments, and generally make this all worth doing day after day, I’ve decided to celebrate with a Box of Weird giveaway.

Win a Box of Weird

As you may know, from time to time I put together these things called Boxes of Weird, so named because I can’t think of anything clever to call them. These unique collections of oddities and novelties (contained within in a generic cardboard box!) are usually only available for my favorite holidays: Halloween, Krampusnacht, and Cannibal Week. However, to celebrate 7 years of what the hell am I doing with my life, I decided to throw together a special Box of Weird giveaway with random things I have lying around.

I have always had small moments of clairvoyance, whether I would think of a number randomly and it would appear several times throughout the week or I could guess locations of objects I would have no way of knowing where they were. The biggest prediction I remember having was when I was in middle school. I could not articulate why I was feeling this way, but I knew for certain something terrible was about to happen. The sensation gnawed at me all day, growing worse as I got into the car with my mom as we drove to the movie theatres. On our way there, we got into a car accident. Moments after the impact, the sick feeling in my chest and the weight in my stomach disappeared and I felt instantly calmer. Thankfully it was not a terrible car accident and everyone involved was fine, but it made a lasting impression.

This is not paranormal, more on the ‘real’ horror side, and I was terrified for a moment. I have a temporary job involving moving shelves. In principle, you spin the handle on a shelf anticlockwise or clockwise and the shelf moves left or right, respectively, so you can only access two shelves at the time. Now, the job tends to be quiet. There is little talking necessary and the only sounds you can hear is something being dropped, the shelves being moved, or footsteps. Sometimes you cannot even hear footsteps.

Even though moving shelves save space, the aisles are narrow. One time I was at the very cul-de-sac of an aisle, when the shelves started closing on me. Obviously, a colleague, whom I did not hear, came in and needed to access another shelf – they could not hear anyone, so they simply spun the handle, but at the moment I panicked, I became claustrophobic, even though it had never happened to me, and I could not yell for a second. It was just like in a cheesy Aegyptian-esque horror film, where one trap involves a room with moving walls. Luckily enough, I finally got myself to scream and was not squished.

When I was a little girl, I seen my mother’s doppelganger. We lived in a trailer and she was at the front of it sleeping in the living room area. I got up to use the bathroom and as I was turning, I looked up into her bedroom, and there I seen her wrapped up under the blankets with her leg poking out. I knew it was her because I could clearly see her ankle tattoo and body form. Well I quickly turned around and ran back to the living room to double check that my mother was in fact still sleeping there, and she was. My family raised me to not be scared of these types of things, but oh my gosh, are they crazy?? The things we’ve seen and heard.. we do belong in the cult of weird.

P.s I don’t think I told her what I seen right away, I told my grandfather who came to smudge our house and tell the bad spirits to go away. I didn’t feel scared but I knew something wasn’t right. I didn’t really learn about them till I got older.

I had a ghost encounter once: I was alone in my dorm room, packing things up to get ready for the end of the semester, and the bathroom door, which was standing open, suddenly shut – too forcefully for it to just be the wind. I thought nothing of it – until I heard the sound of shower curtains moving around coming from inside the bathroom; that’s when I decided to get the Hell out until one of roommates came back.

Oh, and did I mention my school was built on the former grounds of a closed mental hospital?

I’d experienced sleep paralysis once. My husband laying next to me, snoring as usual, I felt as if I were being held down. I was trying to scream and nothing but air came out, and I was trying frantically to touch my husband to wake him, but couldn’t move a muscle, all the time I felt I was wide awake. I finally pulled out of whatever was holding me and woke up my husband, he said I never moved or woke him at all. I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

My house is haunted. Not “scary oogie boogie” haunted, but still, haunted. One day my mom and I were talking while sitting in our living room beside the tv. She was saying that she absolutely did not believe in ghosts when I suggested to her that our house was haunted based on some things dad had said that happened to him. Suddenly the tv started going crazy. The channels flipped up and down and went to static and then flashed back to a channel and the sound was going up and down. So she looks at me real angrily and says “You’re doing that!” I looked at her, and laughed and said “Mom…you’ve got the remote in your hand.” It was SO funny!

As a long-time ghost tracker and chaote, “weird” has pretty much been the hallmark of my life. From spectral felines who cuddle with me at night, to having my nose broken by a ghost, to having /something/ drag me down in an empty crystal-clear lagoon and attempt to drown me, it’s been… an… adventure.

When I was a child growing up in the backwoods of Alton, IL, we lived in a small house in a large wooded area and I loved to play outside in the dark of night. One night while outside playing with my dog, he became very rigid and started letting out a soft growl towards the woods. I figured it was just raccoons or a opossum which was very common to be seen around our house. I turned to look in the direction he was staring and saw a large black animal with two glowing yellow eyes. I was over come with fear and could not for the life of me move as I stared into the eyes of the scariest animal I had ever seen. What happened next was the animal let out a loud roar that woke me from my state of shock and I took off running for the house as my dog let loose a fit of barking. I ran so hard, that I ran through the screen door and to my room and slid under my bed. My mother ran into the room to figure out what was the matter. I explained what had happened and she called the police. The police came out and searched the area but never found the animal or evidence an animal like that had been there. Everyone said I must of saw shadows and my mind was playing tricks on me but I know what I saw and heard that night. I never played outside after dark again as a child. When I got older I stumbled across stories of The Phantom Panthers of Illinois and everything about that night came back to me. I finally had an answer for what had happened that night and truly believe in the existence of them.

My friends call me eccentric, but I know they really want to say weird! I’m okay with that. I like all things creepy. Halloween totally rocks in my house. I pretty much leave skeletons hanging around all year! There are 4 hanging off the clock in the hall.

My daughters and I saw a segment on Ghost Adventures. They were investigating a home here in Las Vegas at 1700 Bannie Avenue otherwise known as La Palazzo. I went ahead and drove over to the place and noticed they had the fence chained up. It had been abandoned for some time. We quickly realize that it wasn’t locked so we went inside. It was reported to be owned by Mobsters at one time. There was even killing room inside. As we walked around I took short videos of different areas of the home. My youngest daughter was afraid to go inside but quick to inspect the video clips we captured. She noticed a man wearing a blood spattered sportcoat standing next to me in one clip. I just about crawled out of my skin! I sent it to my friend to look at and immediately after watching it, a blood vessel popped in her eye and she had a bloody eye for about a week. Craziest thing I’d ever seen. The audio was freaking outrageous!

A few years ago, my family and I were living in a different house then, my sister and I shared a room. It was a fairly large room, more like two rooms turned into one. Anyway, in this house we had already been feeling really weird, especially in our room. The dogs would growl at our closet or stand defensively in front of us until we would leave the room, sometimes exiting out backwards, eyes always locked on some unperceivable threat. Well, one night as I was sitting on my bed listening to music from my phone through my headphones. I happened to look up at my TV and my reflection on the blank black screen was wiggling it’s arms all around…. I was not. That freaked me out, but I just shook it off, stopped looking at the TV and got ready to lay down. I pulled my headphones out of the phone after turning off the music and as I was laying down I could still hear something from the headphones. I picked them up and listened to them and they were still making sounds! I checked to make sure that I really did pull them out of the phone, and sure enough, not even close to each other. I threw them off the bed and put my phone on the side of the bed; I just wanted to ignore everything and just sleep. I laid there and tossed and turned for a few hours in an uneasy sleep. I awoke with a start and suddenly felt a cold slender fingered hand slither up my foot, take hold of my ankle, and started to pull. Immediately I sat up screaming and my sister was screaming and fumbling for the light on her nightstand, knocking everything over in the process. From her perspective she had woken at the same time as I, she having a restless night also. She looked and saw a slumped darkness, one that could not be there by any explanation, and that frightened her. Once she turned the light on, which felt like an eternity but was merely seconds, there was nothing there. Nothing that the light could show. She jumped from her bed to mine, no simple task mind you, and we stayed awake until daybreak, holding each other in the lamplight……. I’ve had my fair share of frights in the night, but this is by far the most terrifying experiences my sister and I have ever had.

When I was about 5 years old, my family drove from Cleveland to visit our neighbors who had moved away…to Minnesota. It was the late summer of 1976. One evening during our visit my brother, the family’s son Mark, and myself were on our way back home from playing in the woods. There was a noise behind us, and before I could turn to look, Marky screamed “RUN!!!!!” at the top of his lungs, and took off. My brother and I didn’t even look back, and we ran right behind Marky. As we were running, my brother, who was ahead of me turned his head to look back over his shoulder…and I will never forget the look on his face. He was scared nearly to death. Running for our lives, I too, turned my head a bit to look. There was a giant…thing…chasing us! It was hairy, and running on two feet, but it’s front legs/feet/hands looked like they were going to touch the ground. I didn’t look long enough to see if they did. I just quickly turned my head back and ran for my life, like the boys. We got back to the house, and frantically tried to tell the adults what happened. Marky’s dad grabbed a shotgun and went out looking for “it”. Of course, he didn’t find it. They boys were convinced it was a BIG FOOT. I didn’t know what I had seen. Years later would resign myself to the fact that it was a bear. Soon after returning home, we have lost touch with Marky and his family, but my brother still swears to this day that it was, in fact, a bigfoot. I’d like to find Marky and find out what HE thinks now 🙂

Strangest occurrence was when I was 20 years old. My then-boyfriend and I were parking at a place called Lake Nippenicket in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Known locally as “The Nip” and located smack in the middle of the Bridgewater Triangle, lots of weird things happen there.

One early autumn night, my boyfriend Eddie and I were parked in the main parking lot where people put their boats in. Across the other side of the lake, we saw a huge bonfire and we could see the shadows of people moving around it. Eddie said he had some friends who lived in that area, so he suggested we drive over there and see if there was a party. We drove around to the other side of the lake and down a bumpy dirt road and came out of the trees onto the beach where the bonfire was…only to find that there was nothing there. The beach was empty, there was no sign that there had been any sort of bonfire there.

We got out of the car and walked to the edge of the water to look up and down the side of the lake, thinking maybe we had misjudged where the bonfire was, but there was nothing – no reflections of fire in the water further down the beach, no noises of the crowd of people we’d seen around the fire, etc. I looked across to the parking lot where we’d been parked before, and I knew we were either in the right spot or near enough that we should have been able to see something. As I was standing there, a weird “something” popped up out of the water. It looked like a really long thin neck, probably no bigger around than my forearm and about as long, with these two big eyes on the end of it. Talk about creepy!

We were both spooked and ran back to the car, and Eddie drove it back around to the parking lot on the other side of the lake and once again, we could see the huge bonfire with all the silhouettes of people moving around it, and we KNEW it was exactly where we had just been.

I’ve had a lot of weird things happen over the years, but that one was especially creepy!

The strangest occurrence I’ve ever experienced was seeing an “orb” in a busted up, old house here in central/NE Pennsylvania. My brother had heard in school that it was haunted, so one day us and some relatives checked it out. Three of us were looking at the house as we pulled out of the driveway, and we all saw the same shape/orb in the upper story window. We were in awe. I couldn’t sleep that night and felt a terrible, immense feeling of dread.

I once had an out of body experience when I was young – I floated outside the window of my house and watched my 4-year-old self and my dad watch ESPN at 3 AM. Also, some weird entity made of light visited me and I could feel my body floating above my bed around the same age. Maybe that house had issues.

The strangest thing I’ve seen? I’m pretty sure the universe’s most incompetent alien lifeform turned up in the bedroom of my old apartment once. I don’t really have any other explanation for it — there was a four and a half foot tall, lumpy little dude in a gas mask, trench coat, stretched-out hat, rain boots, and yellow rubber dishwashing gloves (with weirdly long, pointed fingers) who stood there, saw me, then ran for his life with a high-pitched squeal.

I lived with 2 of my friends after high school. We always thought our house was haunted, and the cat’s absolute terror of being in the upstairs room helped validate that. Once when I was in the kitchen, they started freaking out from the living room. They said they watched a shadow cross the doorway to the kitchen. Only- it moved from the side where the wall was to the open area, so it definitely wasn’t me, and the shadow fell *towards* the light.

I worked in a very old building turned restaurant that was said to be haunted by a previous owner; I believe I saw him out of the corner of my ye one night heading from a entrance to the old narrow stairway that led up stairs to sleeping area

I used to live in an old building. Don’t know the exact date, but when Washington gathered the troops across the street per a historical marker, the building was there. As a single woman, I was fanatical about locking the doors. However one night, I awoke to someone sitting down on my bed. Unfortunately, I was too terrified to look.